New Ideas for IETF-98?

Do you have an idea that you believe would be worthwhile standardising? Now would be a great time to start talking about it, in time for our meeting in Chicago in March!

Chicago Skyline

New ideas can be proposed in the IETF in many ways:

Small improvements and features of ongoing work: these fit right in, just take the idea to the relevant working group. You can send that mail today!

Bigger new ideas may need a working group’s charter be extended or a new working group be created. Often these can be done directly online after discussion; talk to your WG chairs or Area Directors to get the process started. The proposals for significant new work always get discussed in the whole IETF community, on the mailing list, and approved by the steering group (IESG).

Some bigger ideas benefit from face-to-face discussion with the larger community. This is helpful particularly on complex topics, where we need some time to even get to understand the topic well. This also allows discussion of various common trade-off situations, as improvements often come with cost, for instance.

These ideas need to be discussed in a so called Birds-of-Feather (BoF) session; talk to your Area Director about your idea, and follow the RFC 5434 recommendations for setting up a successful BoF. The deadline for submitting BoF proposals for Chicago is February 10, which is one month away! But the process with new Internet-Drafts, mailing lists, and so on needs to start earlier.